German-American Discourse on Politics and Culture

September 28, 2015

Last weekend about one thousand protesters gathered at the US airbase at Ramstein, Germany to protest the US military's use of drone warfare and demand that Germany withdraw from NATO - the organization that brought peace and security to Germany for nearly 70 years. Albrecht Müller, publisher of the anti-American Web site NachDenkSeiten addressed the protesters (see video below). Towards the end of his rather disjointed speech, Müller receives loud applause from the crowd when he praised his good friend Ken Jebsen:

Ken Jebsen is an independent "journalist" and conspiracy theorist who in 2011 was fired from his job as a radio host for his frequent anti-Semitic outbursts. He subsequently wrote the following note describing the Holocaust as nothing more than a PR stunt:

("You needn't send me any information about the Holocaust. I have more than you. I know who invented the Holocaust as PR: Freud's nephew Bernays. In his book "Propaganda" he wrote about how one carries out such a campaign. Goebbels read it and practiced it. I also know who made the race data possible in the Third Reich: IBM with its "Hollerith Machines" (mechanical tabulators). I know who supplied Germany throughout the war with bomber fuel: Standard Oil -that is, Rockefeller.")

By joining forces with Ken Jebsen, Albrecht Müller demonstrates how the German far-left and far-right are united in anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Oh, and the demonstration received extensive coverage by the press - namely by the Russian propaganda outlet RT Deutsch.

September 26, 2015

The favorite question of conspiracy theorists is Cui Bono? Who benefits? Wem nutzt es? For the large conspiracy community in Germany the answer is simple: The Americans! Die Amis! Or, in Saxony: The Jews! Or better: The American Jews! Or: "Der Jude George Soros"!

Who benefits from the EU bailout of Greece? The Americans; they want to destroy Europe. And when that didn't completely succeed the Americans paid human smugglers to send thousands - hundreds of the thousands - of migrants/refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries, providing them with smartphones in the process.

So now Volkswagen is in an existential crisis after it was caught using software to generate false emissions data in the US. The German stock market guru Dirk Müller - aka "Mr. Dax" asks (H/T Andrė) asks:

("But don't you think it's an extraordinary coincidence that this surfaces on the very day in the US when VW unveils its long-awaited new Passat, the vehicle which in the next few years will give GM and Ford a run for their money in their domestic market? It is clear they want to take full advantage of this unfortunate situation. A frontal attack on German industry, which up to now was all-powerful. And what do we do? We play along with great enthusiasm.")

It is still not clear how the diabolical Americans pulled this one off. Did the CIA embed software engineers in Wolfsburg? But Mr. Dax is wrong about one thing: while Mercedes and BMW are respected brands in the US market, VW was always a distant also-ran. There is absolutely no way that the new Passat would give GM or Ford any heartburn.

Putin's Fifth Column keeps growing larger in Germany, fueled by anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as well as by Putin's propaganda outlets Sputnik and RT Deutsch - embraced by many as a legitimate alternative news source.

September 13, 2015

For too long English readers have not had access to the work of Wolfgang Hilbig, arguably the greatest writer of prose to emerge from the former GDR (East Germany). But suddenly we have an embarrassment of riches with two translations of his work: his second novel 'I' (The German List) - released last month by Seagull Books (original German title "Ich" - see my review), and now a collection his short stories - The Sleep of the Righteous (original German Der Schlaf der Gerechten (2003)) - to be released next month by Two Lines Press, who was kind enough to send me an advanced reader's copy. Both works have been expertly translated by Isabel Fargo Cole.

Hilbig got his start as a writer thanks to the efforts of the communist party (SED) to bridge the gap between artists and workers (proletariat) to encourage ordinary workers to write ("Greif zur Feder, Kumpel"). The movement became known as the Bittfelder Weg and the original impulse came from party boss Walter Ulbricht, who said in 1958:

„In Staat und Wirtschaft ist die Arbeiterklasse der DDR bereits Herr. Jetzt muss sie auch die Höhen der Kultur stürmen und von ihnen Besitz ergreifen.“ ("The worker class are already in control of the state and the economy. Now they also need to storm the the ramparts of culture and take ownership.")

Hilbig would seem have been the perfect candidate: a stoker toiling away in the boiler room of a factory who showed unusual talent for writing. The only problem was this: Hilbig didn't write in accordance with the Socialist Realist dictates of the party; he didn't try to orient the consciousness of the workers towards the glorious socialist future. Rather, Hilbig wrote about what he saw with his own eyes - the truth about the real existierender Sozialismus of the GDR. And it was not an inspiring picture. Hilbig became a thorn in the side of the communist cultural bureaucracy and in 1986 was allowed to leave the GDR and stay in West Germany.

In the case of Wolfgang Hilbig, it almost seems as if Franz Kafka had come back to life and been set down in the bleak mining town of Meuselwitz. But while Kafka wrote prophetically about a fictional nightmarish world, which, after his death, did come to pass, Hilbig wrote honestly about his own nightmarish existence: his work is fundamentally autobiographical. Meuselwitz was the center of Hilbig's universe - even after he left to live in East Berlin, and, later, in West Germany. Isabel Fargo Cole, Hilbig's translator, makes an interesting comparison to Faulkner in a recent interview:

In a way, Hilbig’s GDR resembles the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner, whom he admired: as he revisits and revisits these moonscapes, they prove to be an entire universe without spatial or temporal boundaries. By contrast, the Western world seems shallow to him.

For the American reader, The Sleep of the Righteous offers an excellent introduction to Hilbig and his work. These seven stories follow chronologically the arc of the writer's life from his childhood in Meuselwitz to his return to the town after die Wende - the collapse of the GDR. The two best stories are the first and last ones - forming bookends to Hilbig's life.

In The Place of Storms, the first story, we see Meuselwitz through the eyes of the young boy, fatherless, like so many of his generation who lost fathers in the war, who roams the bleak moonscape of the strip mines, ash heaps and polluted pools where the boy and his friends swim. Something about the desolation of Meuselwitz captures the boy's imagination and compels him to write:

"Writing resembled swimming in this sense: once you'd gotten your head above water. once you started to swim, it was impossible to stop until at last you felt the sand of the far shore. In similar fashion you swam off with your words, born up by the blood-warm written words as over the surface of a mine pit smelling of coal and rot ...only that there seemed to be no far shore for these words, with the words ou had to swim on and on, until the words ended by themselves, until the words themselves went under. But swimming in the words was safe, you couldn't drown in them, you could start over with them the next day..."

In the final story - The Dark Man - the narrator is now a celebrated writer living in what is now the western part of a unified Germany. To escape a loveless marriage, he is constantly traveling back to the former East German states to give readings and accept awards, using every opportunity to visit his mother in Mauselwitz. The town is stuck in the past, the factory where he spent years in the boiler room shut down years ago and nothing has come to replace it. There is no work, and men spend their days and nights drinking, waiting for the capitalist prosperity which never seems to arrive. A mysterious man appears - a former Stasi agent who had been assigned the file of the writer/narrator. It turns out this former agent had been living a vicarious existence in spying on on the writer - even reading the correspondence with a woman in Leipzig - Marie, the writer's lover. The former Stasi man - "the dark man" - knows every aspect of the writer's life; he knows the writer better than the writer knows himself. He knows that the writer missed his once chance of happiness by abandoning Marie. In the end, the writer/narrator takes revenge for his own wasted life by killing his alter ego- "the dark man" - and leaving his body in the abandoned factory where he used to work. He knows no one will ever find the body, for the factory will forever be abandoned.

It is interesting to compare Hilbig with Christa Wolf, the "mother of GDR literature", whose work was also heavily autobiographical. Except that Christa Wolf conveniently leaves out large chunks of her life - like the period where she worked for the Stasi as an informant (an "IM"- Informelle Mitarbeiter). In Wolf's last book - Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (see my review) - she is confronted with evidence of her work with the Stasi and promptly has a nervous breakdown. She had erased that chapter of her life from her memory and had no recollection of her work as an IM. Hilbig never forgot anything, no matter how much he drank (he suffered from alcoholism), and never left anything out of his writing. No matter where he lived, Mauselwitz was always in his head, forcing him to confront the bitter truth through his dense prose. Hilbig is the more honest - and far greater - writer.

September 07, 2015

No, not the chancellor, Angela Merkel, but rather the law professor Reinhard Merkel. Unlike the chancellor, Reinhard Merkel is a Putin loyalist. After Putin followed Hitler's playbook in his 1938 Anschluss of Austria by holding a phony plebiscite in Crimea, Professor Merkel gave Russia his seal of approval for taking the peninsula. "Hat Russland die Krim annektiert? Nein." Ever since then, Prof. Merkel has been an honored guest on the Russian propaganda outlet RT Deutsch.

No mention of Assad's brutal murder and torture or demonstrators who took to the streets - initially in peaceful protests against the dictatorship. And what weapons does Assad's army use? Kalishnikov rifles and Russian RPGs. Assad's most potent weapons are Russian MiGs and gunships, which are used to drop barrel bombs on Syrian citizens. Yet Russia - Assad's most powerful ally - in not mentioned once in the FAZ piece.

BEIRUT — President Bashar al-Assad’s government has killed far more people in Syria this year than the Islamic State, monitoring organizations and analysts say, even as the extremist group grabs headlines with its shocking brutality.

Between January and July, Assad’s military and pro-government militias killed 7,894 people, while the Islamic State killed 1,131, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain. In a single day last month, government airstrikes are said to have killed more than 100 people in a residential area of Douma, a suburb of the capital, Damascus.

“No human being should have to endure what Assad is putting us through,” said Hassan Takuldin, 27, who witnessed the Douma attacks.

Government forces are responsible for many more of the estimated 250,000 deaths in the four-year-old conflict than are the Islamic State militants and rebel groups, analysts and monitoring groups say. The figures, they say, underscore how Assad’s indiscriminate use of violence has empowered the Islamic State and other extremist groups and forced millions of Syrians to flee to neighboring countries and Europe. [...]The government’s Russian-supplied aircraft can fly practically unopposed over rebel-held areas to launch airstrikes, which include releasing barrel bombs, metal drums packed with explosives.

Why did Professor Merkel fail to mention once the most important international player in the Syrian conflict? Maybe he wanted more exposure on RT Deutsch and Sputnik. But the more important question is: why did the FAZ - a newspaper I respect - print such a distorted piece on such an important topic?

September 05, 2015

It seems like everyone in Germany is piling on Facebook these days. The social media giant is being blamed for attacks against migrants and for facilitating neo-Nazi activity. "Facebook must act!" is the rallying cry. Any posts expressing hate against foreigners must be extinguished, commenters punished, right-wing accounts banned.

The editors of the news site NRZ conducted a test whereby they reported a video of a neo-Nazi giving the Hitler salute to Facebook and then waited to see how long before the post was taken down. Facebook didn't take the video down and stated that the content did not violate its guidelines:

(According to media reports, the company admits it has made mistakes in taking down racist content. "It is unfortunate that some mistakes have happened. We know it can be frustrating," said a spokesman for Facebook. He explained that the German employees of Facebook are not responsible for deleting racist content, but rather teams located abroad. They are not specifically tasked with seeking out posts that are hostile to foreigners.)

I'm not in favor of censoring content on the Web. I know that there are laws in Germany against displaying the Nazi salute, but I oppose those laws. We allow hate speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution in the United States - even Holocaust denial is permitted. I would rather the hate be out in the open for everyone to see and condemn. German democracy is strong enough to tolerate that.

Besides, Facebook is used to organize aid and support to the refugees, and for organizing the demonstrations against the neo-Nazis. Keep Facebook open and free! (BTW, I do not have a FB account)

Eva Herman has an essay on the current chaos with migrants and asylum seekers on Wissensmanufaktur, which appears to be yet another conspiracy site like Hintergrund, Kopp-Online or NachDenkSeiten (why are there so many conspiracy Web sites in Germany?). Frau Herman is really, really upset about the influx of migrants into Germany; these aliens are intent on destroying German culture. Something this bad for Germany can only be the result of a conspiracy by - yes! - the United States. How does Eva Herman know that that America is to blame for the chaos? Here she cites the great "Oracle of Moscow" who is worshiped by both the Left and Right in Germany: Vladimir Putin.

(It is a very disturbing thought that these smartphones are part of the grand scheme where in the not too distant future every Jihad fighter in world - and even here in Germany - will receive the command for Halali. Lord have mercy on all of us.)